Bright Smoke, Cold Fire

  But Paris was ready. He was. This early-morning meeting would be a simple affair—a formal introduction between himself and the Juliet, before they all went to Tybalt’s funeral. It was also a chance for Father and Lord Catresou to negotiate the details of his Guardianship. Certain rewards and prerogatives were due to the family that gave up their son to be the Juliet’s Guardian, and of course Father would want to obtain the maximum possible.

  Paris wouldn’t have to negotiate. He would just have to kneel to Lord Catresou, express how honored he was—and offer condolences for Tybalt; he was Lord Catresou’s nephew and that couldn’t be ignored—and then he would have to turn to the Juliet and say—

  What?

  In all his lessons, no one had ever told him how to make conversation with the Juliet.

  He knew that right now she was to be addressed as Lady Juliet, but once the final sigils were placed upon her and she became fully the Juliet, she would be simply Lady, because there was only one woman whom the Catresou held in such reverence. But at that point he would be bonded as her Guardian, and he alone—except for Lord Catresou—would have the right to address her simply as Juliet.

  But he didn’t know how to actually talk to her.

  Unbidden, a memory rushed back: the one time he’d seen the Juliet and Tybalt together. It had been two years ago, and entirely an accident. As always, Paris and his family had been invited to attend Lord Catresou’s special feast for the Night of Ghosts. It was the first time Paris had come by himself, straight from the Academy, and he had gotten lost in the twisting corridors of Lord Catresou’s house.

  Then he’d turned a corner, and through a window, he’d seen the Juliet and Tybalt in a little courtyard garden.

  They were both unmasked: they clearly didn’t imagine that anyone else would come upon them. The Juliet sat on a bench, her face turned up; Tybalt stood over her, leaning against a tree and saying something. Paris couldn’t catch the words, but the Juliet’s shoulders hunched and her hand covered her mouth as she started laughing.

  Paris wasn’t just supposed to replace a master swordsman. He was supposed to replace the Juliet’s family.

  Maybe he wasn’t ready after all.

  But it was too late now: they were at the door to Lord Catresou’s study, and the footman was gesturing them forward.

  And then they were inside.

  Paris got only the briefest glimpse of red velvet wall hangings and Lord Catresou’s imposing height before he was down on one knee, head bowed, as was proper before the leader of their clan. His heart was thudding, but he had practiced this reverence. He knew it was correct, just as it was correct for him to wear no mask before someone who so outranked him.

  From the corner of his eye, he could see that Father had remained on his feet, only bowing: such was his right, as one of the five lords, second in rank only to Lord Catresou.

  “My lord Lutreo, and young Paris,” said Lord Catresou. His voice was deep but soft, like velvet. “Rise. I wish I could rejoice on this day.”

  Paris rose and, for the first time in his life, stood within a pace of Lord Catresou. He was a tall, austere man, with a long beard that had gone white when he was barely more than a youth. He had never competed in duels with the other highborn boys, but devoted himself to studying the lore of the magi: the sacred words that allowed them to wield magic without shedding blood as the Sisters of Thorn did. Rumor said it was the mystic secrets that had whitened his hair.

  One thing was certainly true: after seventeen years in which ten other magi had tried and failed, Lord Catresou had marked a baby girl with the first sigils of becoming the Juliet—and she had survived. The girl had been his only daughter, the child of his old age. By his skill and willingness to sacrifice, he had won the undying loyalty and reverence of all the Catresou. At last they would have a Juliet to protect them again.

  And now he was personally receiving Paris into his study, wearing only a half mask of velvet and gold. That familiarity was terrifying enough, but—like Paris—the Juliet wore no mask at all.

  She was as lovely as rumor said: skin like moonlight, hair like midnight, eyes as blue as the twilight sky. She was also very young and very clearly human: a seventeen-year-old girl, staring at him with no expression whatsoever.

  Paris was supposed to say something now, but for a heart-stopping moment he couldn’t remember what. Then he swallowed dryly and said, “My lord, I—”

  “Though he has passed into darkness, young Tybalt walks the Paths of Light,” Father interrupted. The words were a standard piety, his voice dismissive. “It’s the living we must care for now.”

  “Though we are deeply grieved,” Paris added. The words sounded weak and awkward, but he had to say something. It wasn’t right to stand here a few hours before Tybalt’s funeral and talk as if his death didn’t matter.

  No one seemed to have heard him; Father and Lord Catresou hadn’t looked away from each other for even a moment.

  “There are matters to discuss, my lord,” said Paris’s father.

  “Perhaps young Paris and my Juliet would care to step into the garden, and become further acquainted,” said Lord Catresou, gesturing at a little side door.

  It was clearly a dismissal. Paris bowed, then held out an arm for the Juliet, because he knew that was proper.

  She looked at him for a moment, still expressionless. Then she laid her fingertips on his arm, and they went out into Lord Catresou’s private garden together. It was a little round, walled space—no windows—with moss on the ground and a fountain at the center.

  The Juliet dropped her fingers from his arm immediately and took a step away. She didn’t look back at him. Her shoulders were tense; she was clearly furious, as well as bereaved, and why not?

  He wanted to slink into the opposite corner of the garden, but he knew what his father would say. Don’t be a coward, boy.

  “Lady Juliet.” He could only get the words out by stiffly, carefully pronouncing each syllable. “I am sorry I’m not your cousin.”

  She looked back then. Her face was still impassive, but he noticed now that her eyes were slightly swollen. She had probably been awake weeping all night, and now Paris felt even worse. It was so wrong that their fathers had shoved them in this garden and pretended Tybalt never existed.

  He went on, “I never knew him—he left the Academy the year I entered—but he came back for dueling demonstrations sometimes. We could see he was amazing. And we heard about him too, all the time. Everyone said he was the best of our generation.”

  Then he realized that he was sounding like the worst kind of flatterer. Or like he’d spent hours each day wishing he could be Tybalt, which wasn’t true. Well, not entirely true.

  “But he was also your cousin,” he finished awkwardly, “and I’m sorry you lost him. And I want you to know—I’m not Tybalt, but I’ve studied very hard and I swear I will fulfill my duty to you. I will help you protect our people.”

  She flinched at his words, and then she whispered, “Thank you.”

  Paris couldn’t speak.

  The Juliet drew herself up.

  “What must be, must be,” she said. Her voice was quick and rough, like an iron gate clanging shut. “I do not mourn Tybalt. I do not regret his loss. I liked him not; I like you neither. It is all one to me.”

  4

  THE NEXT HALF HOUR WAS excruciatingly uncomfortable. The Juliet said nothing else. Paris kept trying to think of something to say but found nothing; it was a relief when their fathers summoned them back and told them it was time to leave for the sepulcher.

  The funeral, with all its elaborate ceremony, was a relief in comparison. Paris knew his place: walking beside the Juliet in the procession. She carried the jar that held Tybalt’s preserved heart. Her face—barely concealed by her filigree mask—was stiff and pale; her chin was raised, her back was straight, her every step was precise as a blade to the heart.

  She had clearly loved him as a brother two years ago. What had happened
?

  Before them—carrying the jars with Tybalt’s brain and stomach—walked Lord Catresou and Tybalt’s father, Lord Marreus. And before them went the bier, on which Tybalt’s embalmed body rested, hands clasped over his chest, face as still and perfect as the Juliet’s.

  On either side marched the City Guard. This was the price that the Catresou paid for laying their dead to rest properly, instead of burning them like so much trash as the other Viyarans did. Their magi were watched as they performed the sacred rites of embalming—which must be done in only two days instead of the traditional sixty—and they were guarded as they carried their dead to rest.

  Their sepulcher was filled with chains.

  Paris had been to the sepulcher only once before: when his mother was buried. He had been six, so he remembered little of the day aside from Amando clinging to him, Father refusing to look at him, and the horrible glimpse of his mother’s dead, waxlike face. But he remembered the chains: heavy, wrought-iron chains that rattled and groaned as they were drawn around his mother’s coffin and locked.

  There was no chance of the Catresou rising again. Despite the abbreviated embalming, their magi drained every drop of blood from the body, removed the heart and stomach and brain. Such a hollowed-out, twice-killed body could not be animated by the Ruining’s power. And for further safety, the magi placed on every coffin a dead seal: a powerful sigil that would destroy anyone who tried to break it, as well as anything that stirred within it.

  But the Sisters of Thorn did not trust the Catresou, which meant nobody in the city trusted them, and so they must chain their coffins shut as if their beloved dead were rabid animals. As if they were not the only ones who could keep their names and remember themselves as they walked the Paths of Light through the underworld.

  From outside, the Catresou sepulcher was only a small, round building carved of the same white stone as the rest of the city. But it stood at the highest point of the compound, near the center of the city spire, and it rested on solid bedrock. And into the bedrock, year after year, the Catresou had dug spiraling tunnels down into the earth. They had paid in their own blood to make the Sisters reinforce those tunnels, and there among the cold rock and obscene spells they made a holy place for their dead. Every inch of the pale walls was carved into filigree; as the procession wound through the tunnel, their lanterns made light and shadow dance across the lacy surface of the walls.

  Tybalt’s family was renowned enough to have their own room. One-half of it was already stacked floor to ceiling with stone coffins; Tybalt’s lay open by the door, lined with silk and scattered with flowers.

  The veiled mourners keened as they laid Tybalt’s body in the coffin. Lord Catresou and Lord Marreus set one jar by his head, one by his feet. Then a magus came forward, hooded in velvet and masked in gold. He touched a golden seal to Tybalt’s eyes, his mouth, his hands, his feet, as he whispered the prayers that would awaken those limbs and organs in the afterlife. He tucked into Tybalt’s hands a scroll filled with spells for walking the Paths of Light and a stone rod carved with sigils of power.

  Beside Paris, the Juliet took a shuddering breath. Then she stepped forward to lay the jar with Tybalt’s heart upon his chest.

  The funeral was complete. Tybalt had been laid to rest with prayers to the nine gods. His body was embalmed, so that decay would never touch it; his heart and brains and stomach were safely locked in jars, so that evil spirits would never corrupt them; spells and a rod of power had been laid into his hands, so that he could follow the Paths of Light and defeat whatever opposed him. There was no more to be done for him.

  Yet the Juliet paused.

  Paris had assumed that if anything went wrong with the funeral, he would cause it by stumbling somehow. So he was utterly unprepared to see the Juliet ignore her father’s beckoning and drop to her knees. She drew one breath—Paris winced in embarrassment at how raw, how like a sob it sounded—and she pressed her lips against Tybalt’s forehead in a kiss.

  Then she laid her head upon his chest.

  Paris heard Lord Catresou’s soft breath of impatience, saw Lord Marreus’s lips tighten. He knew that the crowd of mourners behind them was staring. He felt the awful tension in his chest of knowing someone is about to get angry.

  Still the Juliet did not move.

  Paris didn’t realize he was moving until he was kneeling at her side. He reached forward—paused—and let his hand drop gently onto her shoulder. He could feel everyone looking at them. He was sure that any moment, Father would reprimand him. But if he didn’t do anything, Father would just get angry at the Juliet instead.

  “Lady Juliet,” he whispered. “Please.”

  She lifted her head and looked at him. Her eyes were dry; her face was fixed in a stony, blank expression that could be grief or fear or fury.

  A moment later she stood, smoothly and decisively. She said nothing, did not look at him again, and Lord Catresou led them out of the sepulcher as if there had been no interruption.

  It was high noon when the funeral feast started; several hours later, it was still going strong when the Juliet turned to Paris and said, “Can you take me back to the sepulcher?”

  “What?” he said. It didn’t seem quite real that she was talking to him.

  “The sepulcher,” said the Juliet. “I am not permitted to go out alone. Will you take me?”

  Paris wasn’t sure that he was permitted to take her, but she was looking him straight in the eyes, and he found himself saying, “Of course, Lady Juliet.”

  There was no going back down into the depths of the sepulcher: the doors were already bolted shut. But the sanctum on the upper level stood open for mourners. There was an alcove with a sacred fire, and on the wall over it was inlaid in gold the swirling lines of zoura, the old Catresou word that meant “correct knowledge”—the wisdom and lore of how to preserve the dead.

  The Juliet knelt before the fire and did not move. Paris stood awkwardly beside her: it felt like too much of an intrusion to kneel with her, but it hardly seemed reverent to stand like one of the unconcerned guards outside.

  “You,” she said suddenly, without looking up. “Do you believe in the Paths of Light?”

  “Of course,” said Paris. That was the whole point of being Catresou.

  “I cannot tell if my father does.” Her voice was quiet, meditative.

  It was such an absurd accusation, it took him a moment to respond. “I’m sure—”

  “No,” the Juliet interrupted without anger. “He must believe. He is so sure, when he reminds me that he will walk them, and I cannot. But he does not . . . respect them.”

  Paris shifted uncomfortably. The Catresou were the only people who could walk the Paths of Light, not just because only they knew the spells for traversing the land of the dead, but because their names had been sealed to them by the Catresou magi. So only they could escape the fate of all other souls: to drift a while on the winds of death as a nameless, gibbering ghost, and then dissolve to nothingness.

  Except the Juliet. The magic that gave her the power to protect also stripped her of her name. She would be buried with no scroll of spells, no rod of power, and her heart rotting inside her body, because nothing awaited her but darkness.

  It was a noble sacrifice. Until this moment, it had never seemed unfair.

  “I can bear that,” she said, “if I can protect people first.”

  Paris swallowed and knelt beside her. “Lady Juliet,” he began, but didn’t know what he was going to say.

  “Tybalt used to bring me here,” she said. “To see the fire, and the word.” She nodded at the golden calligraphy inlaid on the wall. “Zoura. It’s all I ever wanted, to be correct.”

  “You are,” said Paris. “You make our people correct. ‘Justice is the sword of zoura,’ right?”

  Her mouth tilted up a little at the words of the old saying all Catresou children heard a thousand times.

  “My father’s zoura is not mine,” she said. “He thinks ‘corr
ect’ means no more than ‘skillful.’ He made me the sword of the Catresou only so he could use me.”

  Paris knew what this was: the wild imaginings of a hysterical Juliet. He’d been told often enough—he’d read in book after book—that Juliets forever wavered on the brink of madness, and so they were ever accusing their families of imaginary crimes.

  And yet he heard her voice, flat and unhappy and ruthlessly accepting, and he couldn’t disbelieve her.

  Juliet finally turned to look at him.

  “You have tried to be kind to me,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Without thinking, Paris took her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles.

  “I will serve you,” he said. “I promise.”

  5

  “OF ALL THE POSSIBLE REASONS to punish me,” said Runajo, “taking a vow to protect our city seems a strange one.”

  She had been terrified while she waited for the Great Offering. In the two days since—locked in a small cell, awaiting judgment—the fear had come and gone. But now that she was facing the assembled leaders of the Sisterhood, she felt only a cold, heady exultation. She had done what she must. Let others worry about the consequences.

  To receive those consequences, she had been brought to the Hall of Judgment. It was carved of cold white stone, every surface flat and featureless—except for the far wall, where the gigantic obsidian head of Nin, goddess of truth, grew out of the stone panels. It was tilted back to stare at the ceiling; from where Runajo knelt, she could only see the crown of Nin’s head and the tips of her ears.

  Nin was dead, like all the nine gods, and like all the gods did not exist, so she was not Runajo’s problem right now.

  The ring of women standing around her in judgment was.

  The High Priestess raised a single eyebrow, a stark, pale curve against the darkness of her skin. She was an Old Viyaran aristocrat; her hair was such a pale blond it was almost white.

  “Oh? For what should we punish you instead?” she asked, with the glacial amusement of one who could order throats cut if it pleased her.