Juliet drew her sword. She took a deep breath. And she called out, “I have come to speak with Death. I want to make a bargain.”
She waited, heart thudding. But the slope remained gentle and empty and still. No reapers formed themselves out of the dark air to attack her. No revenants crawled out of the ground to devour her—
And Juliet’s breath huffed out in almost-laughter, as she realized there was one danger that could not exist here.
In the land of the dead, she was safe from the Ruining.
And if the reapers would not come to her, then she would have to find them.
So Juliet began to walk down the slope.
And she walked.
She walked.
It was easy going, but weariness began to drag at her. There was no tracking time in this eternal midnight, but it felt as if she had been walking for days. No matter how she tried to keep in mind her duty, her desperation—even her fear—slowly the weariness drained them away. The tiny lights drifted about her, and she kept pausing to stare at them, entranced by the tiny, gentle movements.
Her eyelids felt heavy.
I cannot rest, she thought. Runajo is waiting for me. Paris and Romeo trusted me. My people need me.
Slowly, the undergrowth had become heavier. There were thickets all around her now; she no longer walked an open slope, but followed a path. Here and there to the sides, she saw lone, crooked little trees.
Before her lay a forest.
The trees grew close, branches twisting together. The path she was on ran right through the center, and she paused. There was something ominous in the way the trees huddled together, and she wondered what might hide in their shadows.
But the lights still drifted ahead of her, glimmering against the slick, knobby bark. And she had a mission.
She stepped beneath the leaves.
It was just as silent outside the forest. But here the air was closer, warmer, almost thicker; it tasted of dust and spices. She kept feeling little gusts of air, almost like breaths against the back of her neck, but there was no one with her and the leaves did not stir.
The path twisted again, and then there was a wide, round clearing.
At the other side sat a woman clothed in white. Her back was turned; her dark hair flowed to the ground and wound away among the fallen leaves.
Fear chilled the back of Juliet’s neck, lifted the weariness from her eyelids. Because she had expected the land of the dead to be filled with dead souls, but it was not; and if she could not see other dead souls here, then this woman had never been alive; and perhaps that meant that already, without having faced the reapers, Juliet had found—
“I have come to speak with Death,” she said. “I need to make a bargain.”
She had pitched her voice to carry, trying to sound brave, but in the close hush of the wood, her voice was small and muffled.
“Death wears the face of whoever comes to her,” said the woman. Her voice was low and sweet, but there was a strange, alien note to its music.
Then she rose and turned. “Do I look like you, little girl?”
Juliet flinched back, hand dropping to her sword.
“No,” she whispered.
There were seven eyes in the woman’s forehead, each a different color. In each of her palms gaped a wide, red mouth, lined with little pointed white teeth.
And Juliet recognized her.
“You’re the Eyes and the Teeth,” she said.
The Catresou magi told stories of many monsters who roamed the land of the dead, hungry for anyone who had not yet found the Paths of Light. The most fearsome of them all was the Eyes and the Teeth, who entranced dead souls with lullabies before she ate them. Not even good Catresou could escape her unless they knew one particular spell, and Juliet had never been taught. It was not considered fit for her to learn, when she had no real name, and would turn into a mewling ghost regardless.
Juliet knew this, and yet she was still a little comforted. Because her people had known at least one thing. In this strange, dark world of death, there was one creature that might follow rules she understood.
“Look,” said the Eyes and the Teeth.
And Juliet saw.
There were people in the forest. The people were the forest. Their bodies were tangled among the roots, half covered in dust and moss; they were wound into the trunks, eyes and mouths blindly gaping among the tree knots; branches and twigs grew in and out of stretching hands and fingers.
Juliet had grown up hearing tales of the nameless ghosts who forgot they had ever been human. She had never imagined anything so horrible as this.
“Don’t be afraid,” said the Eyes and the Teeth. “They long for this rest. Don’t you feel it?”
And Juliet did. The forest was not silent now: there was a soft, droning song in the air, like a hundred thousand sleepers humming, and her heart began to slow and beat in time to the gentle thrum.
Here there was no more striving. No more weeping, no more waking. An end to hate and anger, an end to fear and pain. To laughter and to longing, to love itself and all the chaos it could bring.
She was on her knees. Her palms pressed against the soft, soft earth. Her lips felt numb. She knew that she was not supposed to sleep, but it was hard to remember why.
“Can they be woken?” she asked breathlessly.
“Oh,” laughed the Eyes and the Teeth, “you are not the first to hope that.”
Fingers stroked through Juliet’s hair; she shivered, but then leaned into the touch. When she had still been a child, but her mother was already dead, she had longed so often for someone to touch her hair again, to hold her with gentleness.
“Consider the two who lie beside you,” said the Eyes and the Teeth, and through dimming eyes, Juliet saw them: two ridges of roots and arms and legs, braided together in an endless embrace. “Once they were both alive, and then only one of them was.”
And as the Eyes and the Teeth spoke, Juliet saw the story, as if it were a dream:
There was a girl and there was a boy, and they loved each other as everyone does: as no one else has loved before. But the girl died and the boy, he was lost and good as nameless without her. So he sought and he learned and he found secret ways, and at last he walked into death while still alive, his heart pulsing with mortal blood and hope.
And he found her, here in the grove where seeking ends: her lovely limbs tangled with the earth and roots, her fair face cradled by the leaves and dirt. He called to her and wept for her and he begged her. But she did not wake, and he would not leave her.
At last he sang to her, a song of all his love and longing. “Wake, my love, I came so far to find you, I cannot rest without you.” Oh, there was never such a song in this land before.
And her eyes did not open but her lips did part, and she sang to him: “I am dead, I am silent, I am still. I will never wake again.”
He sang, “But kiss me once, and then I’ll be content to go.”
She sang, “Kiss me but once, and you’ll lie here with me forever.”
So he pressed his face to the earth and kissed her sleeping mouth, and he took root, and fell asleep. And now he lies beside her, who sought so long to find her, and he knows her not, nor loves her, and though they lie here for eternity, he will never kiss her once again.
Juliet could see no longer. She was cradled by the earth, lulled by the fingers in her hair. All about her, the forest hummed with endless peace.
This was death. This was the whole of death: the silence and forgetting. There was no use trying to save Viyara with bargains. No one had ever bargained with Death and won, because to bargain was to sleep, and to sleep was to forget.
Here in the grove, where all seeking came to an end.
But the fingers were gentle in her hair, and they were like her mother’s: her mother who was long, long dead, but once stroked her hair as she lay drowsing.