Endless Water, Starless Sky (Bright Smoke, Cold Fire #2)
Rosamund Hodge
Dedication
For Rebecca,
who gave aid and comfort
Epigraph
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night, Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.
—Romeo and Juliet, act 3, scene 2
Prologue
O my Juliet, my most beloved Juliet—
I have no right to call you “beloved” or “mine” any longer.
ROMEO HAD WRITTEN MANY LETTERS in his life, but none so important as this one. He had thought about it all day, but it was only now, after the sun had sunk beneath the rooftops, that he began to write slowly by the light of a lamp.
The first time he had written to Juliet, he had scribbled on page after page and thrown them all away as he tried to find the perfect words. But he was no longer the son of Lord Ineo, living in luxury; he was a fugitive presumed dead, hiding at the house of his friend Justiran, in the Lower City. And Justiran was only an apothecary; Romeo could not waste the pen and paper he’d been so generously given.
Slowly, he wrote another line.
If you thought me dead, know this: I am alive, and I deserve to die.
He’d been so proud of his letters once, how his words had won him Juliet’s heart. But now there was no rhyme or turn of phrase that could ever set things right. All he could do was confess the truth.
I am alive because when we tried to make me into your Guardian—when the magic went so terribly wrong, and the land of the dead opened around us—I was dragged out by your kinsman, Paris Catresou.
Just thinking the name made the raw ache at the back of Romeo’s mind start up again. That terrible, hollow sense of nothing where he had once felt the mind of Paris, with all his pride and his kindness and his prickly sense of honor.
Because Paris hadn’t just saved Romeo from being dragged into the land of the dead. When his hand closed around Romeo’s wrist and pulled him back, the magic that Romeo and Juliet had meant to use on themselves had locked around the two boys, binding their minds together with the same link that was meant to exist between a Juliet and her Guardian.
And now Paris was dead. Romeo had known it as soon as he woke up from his injuries, even before Justiran told him with sad eyes and a gentle voice.
Even when they had both been trying to block the bond as much as they could, Romeo could still feel that Paris was there, alive and just a heartbeat away.
Now he was gone.
Romeo stared at the page. He wanted to write more. To say, Paris was loyal to you, he wanted to serve you, he was honorable and kind and the kinsman you deserved to have. And he deserved to have you know it.
But this letter was not for making Romeo feel better about the loss of his friend. It was not even for honoring Paris as he deserved. It was for Juliet, and what she needed to know.
He began to write again:
I deserve to die, because I destroyed your clan.
You have been told that your father, Lord Catresou, conspired with necromancers. It is true. Barely had Paris saved me when Lord Catresou came to the sepulcher with one of his men. We overheard them discussing their plans to use you in the service of a nameless Master Necromancer. We swore to hunt down this necromancer and avenge you.
We could not find him. But we discovered where he was about to conduct a ceremony with your father, one that would open the gates of death and destroy Viyara.
This is how much they betrayed you: when they wrote the spells on your back to make you the Juliet, they changed them. They made you into a living key, able to open up the land of the dead. After you disappeared, they found some relic they could use in your place. But that power still remains in you, and you must know this, because the Master Necromancer was never caught. He might still try to capture and use you.
Romeo stared at the paper a long time after writing those words. Because he wanted to add: I am going to find him. I am going to stop him. I will save you.
But he had promised her that they could be happy together, and that had been a lie. He was done with making foolish promises out of his hopes.
So he wrote the truth instead.
That is one of my sins: that I could not stop the man who was the first author of all these misfortunes. But it is not the worst. Because we did not think we could stop the Master Necromancer alone. So we went to the City Guard.
And Romeo couldn’t stop himself from writing the next paragraph; it felt like he would be slandering Paris if he did not.
Paris did not want to. He knew what it might mean for your people. But I was too naive, and in the end we were both too desperate.
We stopped your father’s plot, though Paris died in the fighting. But it gave my father, Lord Ineo, the excuse he needed to destroy your clan. To force you to kill them.
And it was I who made it possible.
I am no longer the son of your enemies. I am the very worst of them, because first I swore to love you, and then betrayed you. And I am prepared to accept whatever punishment you see fit.
I meant to tell you this to your face, to kneel at your feet again and offer you my life. But you have been too often forced to take vengeance already. I will not do anything that could force you again. I will wait here, at the house of Justiran—the apothecary who helped us. If you desire justice, come here. Or send me your own letter, and I will come to you obediently.
With deep love and deeper remorse,
The one who no longer deserves to be called your husband,
Mahyanai Romeo
He put down the pen. His fingers were sore from gripping it, and he rubbed at his knuckles as he stared at the page.
It seemed like such a pitiful little thing. But telling her the truth was all he could do for her. He wished—
And then he heard the knock at the window.
It’s Vai, he thought as he went to open the shutters. Because Vai, who had promised to carry the letter to Juliet, liked to travel across the rooftops more than half the time. And she had said she would come this evening.
He flipped up the latch, swung the shutters open—
And stopped.
Romeo’s fingers were still gripping one of the shutters, the wooden corner digging into his palm hard enough to hurt. But he couldn’t let go. Couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything except stare at the tall, dark-haired man crouched on the rooftop outside the window.
Even in the dim moonlight, he knew that face.
“Makari?” he whispered.
Mahyanai Makari. His tutor, who had raised him since he was ten, who’d been father and brother at once, more kin to him than anyone who shared his own blood.
Who was dead.
Makari was dead, murdered by Juliet’s cousin Tybalt. Romeo had held him in his arms as he died, had smelled his blood dripping across the hot cobblestones, and then he’d gone mad himself. He’d picked up Makari’s sword and killed Tybalt and doomed them all.
“Nothing gets past you,” said Makari, in exactly the same tone of wry mockery that Romeo remembered, and he climbed in the window.
Romeo stumbled back a step, numbly thinking, This isn’t possible. His head felt dazed and ringing, like somebody had struck him a blow, and then he remembered Makari’s knuckles rapping him lightly on the skull to startle him out of a daydream, and—
And then he remembered that this was possible. That he and Paris had seen Tybalt summoned back to life by the Master Necromancer, and made into his slave. Tybalt had tried to kill them all, before they killed him again.
He remembered that Justiran was alone and defenseless downstairs.
He drew a breath, but before he could shout a warning, Makari had him pressed against the wall, an elbow to his collarbone and a hand over his mouth.