The dancer stood with his back to her, but Juliet knew him even before he turned. She knew him by the proud set of his shoulders, by the tilt of his head. She knew him because he was Tybalt, her cousin, whom she once loved more than anyone else alive. Who she once thought loved her.
Xanna ran to him, and he took her in his arms and kissed her soundly.
Then he saw Juliet.
Their eyes met, and the world stopped as memory seized her, made her live the terrible hour once more:
Romeo kissed her again, again, and then she pushed him away to the window before he could kiss her for the hundredth time.
“You must go, it’s already dawn,” she said. “You’ll be back tonight.”
“I will die a thousand times before tonight,” he said, and she laughed as he kissed her palm and pressed his poem into it, before climbing out the window.
She had slid back into her bed and started to drowse when the key rattled in the lock. The door flung open, and Tybalt strode into the room and ripped the covers from the bed. He stared down at her through the slits of his mask.
“Someone climbed out your window,” he said, and there was a terrible coldness to his voice she had never heard before. “Who was it?”
Fear was a vise about her heart. But he was her most beloved cousin, and she had never been a liar. So she stood and she told him of her love, of the secret wedding two-thirds complete.
“He slept with you?” Tybalt asked, and his low voice made the words unclean.
Her cheeks were aflame with blushes, but she met his eyes. “The third night makes it a marriage,” she said. “It’s the custom of his people. He promised me—”
The slap to her face stung, but the words that tumbled out of Tybalt’s mouth were worse: whore and slut and traitor.
“I’ll kill him,” he said, and shook her by the arm. “I’ll kill him, and when I’m your Guardian, I will govern you as you deserve.”
Then he shoved her away and strode from the room.
She sank to the floor and hugged herself, thinking, He doesn’t really mean it. He wouldn’t really do it. But she was too afraid to follow him.
She never saw him alive again.
She saw him now. There were no masks here in the land of the dead, so she could see the derision that curled across his face as he recognized her, as he sauntered forward. The same mix of shame and fear and rage curled in her gut.
She did not want to be a coward. She waited, and tilted her head up to meet his eyes when he stood before her.
“I bled for you,” he said. “I died for you. I was raised a slave and I died again. Because of you, my lady.”
Romeo would have words for this bleeding, breaking feeling in her chest. Romeo, perhaps, would be able to weep. She stared up at Tybalt dry-eyed and said nothing.
“There are a hundred others here,” he said. “Good Catresou men who died because you wanted to warm your bed with Mahyanai filth.”
This was a worse trial than any reaper. But Juliet stood her ground, and stared him in the face. She had a mission that left her no time to surrender to her guilt and her shame.
“If none of them found the Paths of Light,” she said, “then none of them were good Catresou.”
Tybalt barked a laugh. “Dead, and you haven’t realized? There are no Paths of Light. There is nothing here in death but blood and memories.”
The light grew redder at his words, or perhaps it had already changed and only now she was noticing.
If you say that, you are no Catresou, she thought, but she couldn’t say it, because the same dread had been gnawing at her own heart ever since she came to this place.
This place, so like and unlike everything her people ever believed.
Xanna peered around Tybalt’s shoulder. “Who is she?”
“Don’t you know?” Tybalt’s voice rose. “Hasn’t anyone guessed?” He threw up his hands. “Gather round, all you noble dead, and take a look! This is the notable whore who fancied herself the wife of Mahyanai Romeo.”
There was a muttering from every direction, far vaster than the size of the crowd. Juliet saw faces, Catresou faces, and some that she recognized. They were pushing their way through the crowd toward her. They were molding themselves out of the air.
They were her reckoning. They were the blood she had shed, the fate she deserved, but she had a mission.
The music still played on, and her heart was as fast as the drumbeat.
Tybalt turned back to her. “Tell us, who died for you,” he said, “what joy did you get of him, that was worth our blood?”
She met his gaze and said, “It’s not modest for a wife to speak so of her husband. But I’ll show you the arts I used to ensnare him.”
And she drew her sword and began to dance.
The crowd pressed closer, but Juliet’s blade flashed and whirled in a circle around her. She was dizzy with fear and regret and fury, but she had known this dance since she was ten years old. It uncoiled itself from her bones and danced itself with her limbs, and there was nothing left in the world but the sword and her hands and her feet, the beat of the music and her drumming heart.
The sword and its dance had always been her language. She had loved Romeo first because he had caught the sword from her, had used those words to speak to her.
The music ceased. She realized she had closed her eyes, and she opened them.
Darkness was all around her, but she stood in a pool of light.
Before her was a reaper.
But it was not like the monsters she had seen in the world above. It was terrifyingly strange, but it was beautiful: a tall, lithe creature whose two golden eyes were alight with intelligence. Dark hair cascaded from its head. Its fingers were longer than human fingers, and tipped in claws; its mouth was a crow’s beak; little feathers dusted its cheekbones. But all that strangeness seemed only a kind of ornament, like the dizzying curlicues of an elaborate jeweled necklace.
And it had wings: huge wings of soft, dark feathers that beat the air in a slow, graceful dance.
“Why are you here?” asked the reaper. Its voice was low and sweet, neither male nor female.
“I am looking for Death,” said Juliet, and her heart beat fast with fear and exultation. Because she might still fail, the reaper might kill her, but she would not wander lost forever in the land of the dead. She was on the path to finding Death.
“Are you indeed?” The reaper tilted its head. “And what will you say to her?”
“I will beg her to stop the Ruining.”
“And what will you offer her?”
“Whatever I must,” said Juliet. Her fingers tightened on the hilt of her sword. “Whatever trial or test you want to give me, I am ready.”
“You are very brave,” said the reaper. “But you are not the first one to be so brave, and to beg a favor of Death.”
And the reaper’s voice fell into the cadence of a story, and Juliet saw it happening before her, as if in a dream:
There was a warlord, so ruthless and so terrible that all the world lived in fear of him. Whatever he wanted was his for the taking. Until one day he saw a sad-eyed slave girl singing to herself in his garden. In that moment, he loved her, and found himself wanting what could never be had by force. Long he courted her and long her heart was dead to him, until at last he wept at her feet, renouncing his sword and his armies and his pride. Then she raised him up, and kissed him, and they fled together into the wild.
But the warlord still had enemies. In the end they found him, and shot him with arrows as he rested in the girl’s arms. She screamed, and she wept, and she walked the whole world until she found a path to the land of the dead. There, in a field of poppies, she found Death: and Death wore her face, and smiled at her.
“Tell me,” said the girl, “where is the one I love?”
“He lies in a river of boiling blood,” said Death, “remembering all the blood he shed on earth. Tell me, why do you come here?”
“I wish to have him back,” said the girl. “I wish to have him live again. I wish only to kiss him one more time.”
“Those are three wishes,” said Death.