He thought he understood what drove her. Sometimes the cold weight of his flesh and blood and bones was almost too much, pressing him down with the helpless desire to be forever still. If he had thought that tearing open his veins would make that happen, maybe he would try it too.
No, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, his master wouldn’t want it. Nothing was real and nothing mattered except for making his master happy, and he couldn’t understand why the Little Lady would ever try to displease him.
His hands were shaking, his dead heart frantically pumping.
The doorknob rattled, and he was on his feet in an instant. But it was only his master, come home at last.
“Anything happen?” his master asked.
“No. Nothing.”
His master turned to the Little Lady. She finally moved, raising her eyes to meet him; he took her hand and drew her up out of the chair.
“There’s going to be a lot of death tomorrow,” he said gleefully. “Not at my hands. I’m still going to need a final Night Game. But the Catresou are dying. They’re going to pay for everything they did to me and you.”
He cupped his hands around her face, and kissed her. She kissed him back greedily, her fingers tangling in his hair, drawing welts down his neck.
“Master,” said the dead boy.
His master turned and looked at him. “Yes?” he said.
“What’s my name?”
His master shook his head. “You really are stupid.”
This was true.
“Your name is Paris. You used to be a Catresou, but now you help me control them. Sometimes you kill them. That’s really all you’re good for.”
“Oh,” said Paris.
“And right now, you’re going to leave me alone with my lady.”
“Yes, master,” he said, and was out of the room in the same breath.
But as he walked down the hallway, he found himself thinking about his name again. Trying to patch together the memory, and hear that strange boy’s voice as he said, Paris.
The night was endless.
Runajo waited in her room, but Juliet never came back to sleep. When the last light had drained from the sky, she panicked and went looking for her, terrified that somehow she had found a way around Runajo’s order not to kill herself.
But she was kneeling in the shrine of the dead, staring at the wall where Romeo’s name was carved. Runajo saw her through the doorway and didn’t dare go inside, didn’t dare make a sound.
What right did she have?
She went back to her room alone. She thought, In seven hours, I will have to give her the order.
Sunjai hadn’t sent any message. The calculations weren’t finished. Lord Ineo believed he was doing his best for clan and city.
There was no way out.
She didn’t sleep. She tried for a little while, but then she got up again.
Runajo wasn’t afraid. Her mind was completely calm. She knew what she had to do, and she knew that she would do it.
But her body was afraid. Waves of cold-hot fear washed through her stomach, and if she sat still for too long, her hands started shaking.
She tried to calm herself. She took deep breaths, and she told herself what she always had when she was afraid: I can pay any price. I can renounce any love. I can bear any terror.
But it had been one thing to tell herself that when she was entering the Sisterhood, when she was scheming to risk her life entering the Sunken Library. Now, she wasn’t the one paying the price.
Your heart is stone, she told herself savagely, remembering how she had abandoned her mother’s dead body to sneak into the Sisterhood before the rest of her family could stop her. You are pure obsidian inside your chest.
But it wasn’t true. Perhaps it had never been true.
Sometime in the trackless middle of the night, she finally started crying.
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t bear it.
She wasn’t the one who would be holding the sword or the knife; how could she pity herself for this?
All her life, Runajo had been terrified of dying: the silence and the ending. The absolute, utter nothing—because she had always believed that her people were right, that her parents had ceased to exist the moment they died and that someday she would too. She remembered lying awake at night, sick with fear over it.
Now she imagined it: her heart slowing. Her breath stopping. Choking, infinite darkness. Nothing, nothing, nothing forever, and it still had the power to make her heart flutter in fear.
If she could pretend that she was already dead, that she no longer existed, maybe she could get through this.
When the sky began to pale with approaching dawn, Runajo stood up. She washed and dressed herself as carefully as the morning she had gone to the palace of the Exalted.
The walk to the shrine felt like it took forever. The morning sun seemed very bright; every line of the building, every pebble on the ground scraped at her eyes, razor-sharp. Her mind skittered through every link in the chain of logic that had brought her here, and she couldn’t find a break, couldn’t find a place where she could have changed things.
Unless she had cut Juliet’s throat when the Sisters of Thorn ordered her to. Unless she had dared to walk into the Mouth of Death when she had the chance.
When she opened the door of the shrine, Juliet looked up at her. She hadn’t moved from her place on the floor. Her face was pale, her eyes bloodshot with exhaustion.
There were a thousand things that Runajo wanted to say: I’m sorry and I have to and Run, just run, I order you to run away from us all.
But she opened her mouth and said, “Juliet. I order you to go with Subcaptain Xu, obey her orders for the length of today, and protect the sacrifice.”
14
JULIET KNEW THE FIRST PRISONER, when Xu’s guards brought him out into the narrow white hallway of the garrison. She wasn’t sure that she’d ever exchanged ten words with him, but she knew him at a glance: Amando Mavarinn Catresou. Lord Lutreo’s second son, and Paris’s older brother.
He would have been a guest at the ceremony where Paris became her Guardian. If she had stayed.
The few times she’d seen him before, he’d always been lurking a step behind his older brother, Meros, smirking at something he’d said. Now he was thinner, and paler, and not smiling at all as the guards dragged him out, hands shackled together.
“You—you’ll pay for this!” he shouted, struggling against them. “My brother will see you all punished! He’ll tear you to pieces, he’ll—” He wrenched against the guard holding him and nearly broke free; then the guard slammed a fist into his gut and he sank to the ground.
“Don’t hit him,” Xu said sharply. “Why don’t you already have the bloodwine here?”
Juliet looked at Amando. Their gazes met, and his eyes were wide with panic, but he found the strength for a sneer.
The compulsion hummed in her spine, cold and unforgiving. She would see him dead. She would not be able to stop it.
“Let me do it,” she said, and snatched the flask of drugged wine from the guard who had just come running.
She knelt in front of Amando. “I’ll say the prayers for you,” she whispered. “I promise. Just drink this and it won’t hurt.”
“Traitor,” he panted. “You’re not one of us. You—”
“Enough,” said Xu. With one hand, she gripped his head by the hair and tilted it back; with the other, she pinched his nose shut. Juliet poured the wine; Amando struggled and choked, but in the end he had to drink it.
“Hate you,” he said when they released him, his voice already starting to slur. In another minute he was completely docile, his pupils huge, his mouth slack. The guards hauled him to his feet and he went obediently, swaying but not struggling.
“Bring out the next one,” said Xu.
One by one, nineteen more prisoners were brought out—women as well as men, because the Mahyanai had no honor, of every age from barely adult to doddering on their feet with the weight of their years. Some fought the bloodwine like Amando; others clutched at the cup and gulped it down, desperate to escape the pain that waited for them.
All became the same: wide-eyed, wordless, stumbling, and obedient. Like dumb animals led to slaughter. Fury strangled Juliet, because this was what the rulers of Viyara did, what they thought holy: human lives reduced to cheap fodder for the walls.