It must be so much worse in the old embalming rooms that the Catresou had used for generations. This was just a cellar in one of the Catresou safe houses, recently converted for use on the dead.
He didn’t want to be here in this dim, crowded room—there were tables everywhere, and shelves filled with jars and metal equipment—but Ilurio had told him that he was needed. They wanted him to help carry out Emera’s body.
“Who’s there?” called out someone from behind a line of shelves. It sounded like an old man.
Romeo took a breath—his stomach pitched at the scent—and said, “I was told you need me to—”
Then he stepped around the shelves and stopped.
The old man was one of the Catresou magi. Romeo could tell, because he wore the golden full-face mask that the magi wore at all Catresou ceremonies. He’d never seen one before, of course, but he’d heard stories passed along by City Guards who had to stand watch at Catresou funerals.
The old man was also an embalmer. Romeo could tell, because there was a man’s corpse laid out on the table in front of him, sliced open from neck to navel, ribs pried apart. The old man had his hands plunged into the middle of the corpse’s abdomen.
Romeo stared. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t look away. He’d seen blood and death before, but not like this. The Mahyanai burned their dead cleanly; they didn’t peel them open and cut out choice portions like slaughtered animals.
“What are you doing?” the man demanded. His hands must have moved slightly, because Romeo heard a very quiet, very distinct wet noise.
Romeo bolted. He managed to make it out of the room before he threw up.
“Oh, my,” said Ilurio from behind him. “Did the brave warrior find something that he couldn’t stand?”
Romeo was miserable enough that it took him a few moments to work out that if Ilurio was lurking in the hallway behind him, if he had followed him down here, then—
“If you were any younger, I would thrash you,” Gavarin announced.
“I’m sorry,” Romeo said quickly, straightening, and gulped as his stomach pitched again. He hadn’t thought this moment could get more humiliating. “I—I just—”
“Not you.” Gavarin had been holding Ilurio by the shoulder, as if he’d dragged him there, but he released him with a sigh and handed Romeo a handkerchief. “The young master here.”
“I’m doing us all a favor,” said Ilurio. “If he deserved to wear a mask and call himself Catresou, he’d be able to stomach a sacred rite.”
“If you were a Catresou in any way except that your mother pushed you squalling out of her body, then you wouldn’t have used the sacred embalming to play a prank,” said Gavarin. “I’m going to apologize to the embalmer; you can start cleaning that mess up.”
“We’re not on the raid anymore,” Ilurio said sulkily. “You don’t have command over me.”
“No,” Gavarin agreed. “But I’m still first guard to the Lord Catresou, so it’s up to me if you ever get to join in a raid again.”
“How dare you,” said Ilurio. “Don’t you know I’m—”
“The son of illustrious dead parents, heir to a fortune that doesn’t exist anymore. The world you knew is over, boy. Wake up and start earning your place in the new one.”
“I’ll clean it up,” Romeo interrupted. He wanted to just escape quietly while Ilurio and Gavarin were arguing, but he knew that wasn’t right. “I should be able to bear your people’s customs.”
There was a moment of fragile silence, as Romeo felt the yawning gulf between himself and anyone who had been born Catresou. Then Gavarin said, “Get to work,” and vanished inside the embalming room.
Ilurio was still glaring at him. “Do you think you deserve to be our hero?”
“I never said I was.”
“No, you just put on one of our masks and asked us all to worship you.”
Romeo felt the heat along his cheekbones. The more time he spent around the Catresou, the more he was aware of how arrogant he’d been, putting on the symbol that they all had been forced to take off.
“I didn’t do this for your worship,” he said. “I only wanted to serve the Juliet.”
Ilurio’s laugh was harsh and ugly. “You think we’ll respect you because you love that whore?”
The words seemed to slide straight down Romeo’s spine. The next moment, he had shoved Ilurio against the wall, and his voice felt like it was coming from someone else as he said, “I killed the last man who called her that.”
Ilurio’s eyes were wide in actual shock.
Then the door opened. Romeo heard Gavarin’s footsteps as he came out. He didn’t say a word about I thought you were cleaning up. He didn’t need to; Romeo could feel his gaze on the back of his neck, and it said everything.
Romeo let go of Ilurio and stepped back. “Where’s—we need a cleaning cloth,” he said.
“There’s a storeroom down to the left,” said Gavarin, in such a flat voice that it was impossible to tell if he was furious or trying not to laugh.
“Thank you,” Romeo said, and marched down the hallway. Surprisingly, Ilurio followed him without a word. Maybe he was embarrassed too.
“I still don’t believe you’re a warrior sent by the gods,” Ilurio grumbled, when they had gotten to the storeroom. Then he shot Romeo a sideways glance. “Did you really kill someone?”
Romeo remembered Tybalt’s blood on the cobblestones. The shouts and the smell and the dizzying hot sun. If not for that one afternoon of loss and fury, Juliet would belong to her people still, and the Catresou would be safe, and Emera would be alive. So many people would be alive.
“Yes,” he said.
Romeo had heard all his life about the exotic, sinister pageantry of Catresou funerals. He supposed that the actual ceremonies in the sepulcher would be more elaborate, but even so, it was far simpler than he would have imagined.
The Catresou had obtained a house built over the ruins of another, which meant there were several underground rooms. They didn’t bother with individual coffins or graves; they had just carved a pit out of the floor and lined it with bricks and then a white cloth. The four bodies lay in it nestled side by side, each wrapped in a shroud. If Romeo could ignore the nagging awareness that the bodies were going to be left there forever, he could almost pretend that they were simply performing a normal Mahyanai vigil.
He couldn’t really pretend, though, because there was a magus in the traditional gold mask. And a row of jars, three for each body.
Meros was there, dressed and masked in somber black—all the Catresou were masked for the occasion. The magus went to each of the bodies, touching their eyes, mouths, hands, and feet with a golden seal as he muttered prayers in an undertone. The soft whisper of his voice, like fluttering moth wings, made the back of Romeo’s neck prickle with uneasiness.
Emera had wanted this. She had thought it holy. Just as Paris had, as Juliet had.
It was this “holy” Catresou magic that had twisted the spells on Juliet, that had tried to rip the world open and end it. Romeo stared at the magus and wondered if he had been part of that plot. If he was working with the necromancers now.
After the magus, Meros went to each corpse and laid one jar at the head and another at the feet: the embalmed stomach and brain. Romeo reminded himself that this was enough to keep them safe. The chained coffins in the Catresou sepulcher were only a precaution; no body could rise as a revenant with so many organs removed.
Then it was time for the final jars to be laid: the embalmed hearts of the dead.
Romeo had been given Emera’s. It was small, a cheap little unglazed jar that had probably once held oil. It was light in his hands, and he tried not to think about the tiny object inside it.
Emera’s face was very pale, but peaceful. Her wounds were covered by the shroud, and so too were the seams from the embalming. Romeo still felt nauseous when he looked at her; his mind kept skipping back to the bloody embalming room, and the way she had clawed at the bars of the cage—and that was wrong, because she was more than a corpse, more than a monster.
She was a person, and Romeo had never really known her, and he didn’t deserve to stand at her funeral.
But there was no one else. So he did.
12